This book of Susanne Strätling was her habilitation thesis from 2014, published in Germany in 2017. Her ambition is intriguing and impressive. After the “philology of the eye” (the pictorial turn) and “philology of the ear” (the sonic turn), she aspires to write an alternative “philology of the hand,” situated between poetics, rhetoric, linguistics, psychology, ergonomics, history of law, philosophy, and the visual arts. This new turn should help to rethink parameters, subjects, and method of philology, to bridge the gaps between voice and writing, letters and images, homo faber and homo ludens, words and deeds, life and death, sacred and secular, and to remap the hierarchies of the senses putting the eye under the control of the hand. This enormous task could obviously not be completed in one book, and Strätling presents some possible directions. The chosen period (1900s–40s) includes artistic experiments (Aleksei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matiushin, El Lissitzky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Daniil Kharms), existential reflections (Iakov Druskin) and theoretical concepts of linguists, literary scholars, psychologists, theorists of the scientific management of labor (Lev Polivanov, Nikolai Marr, Viktor Shklovskii, Lev Vygotskii, Aleksandr Luriia, Aleksei Gastev).
In seven chapters of her book, Strätling correlates pairs, such as hand and mouth, hand and writing tools, hand and body, and hand and mind. She goes from representational doubling of words in gestures, naturalization of artificial signification processes in corporeality to differentiations between Tadeusz Zieliński's and Polivanov's sound gestures, Marr's glossogenetic gestures, Sergei Tretiakov's word gestures, and so on. Strätling's material is sometimes expected (Meyerhold's biomechanics, Krychenykh's handwritten books, Lissitzky's new typography), sometimes surprising (Druskin's diaries).
The theoretical framing (Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Engles, Wilhelm Wundt and Siegmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Morice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Willem Fussel) is a challenge since Strätling aspires to correlate with contemporary western discourses. This thematic approach is similar to Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (2017) by Emma Widdis, who has analyzed the sensory experience of objects and surfaces in Soviet film in the framework of play and labor; yet Widdis's book (and Soviet film) is not acknowledged by Strätling.
Strätling's book contains two parts that I would call the referential and the analytical. In the first four chapters, Strätling contrasts different concepts (practical, artistic, theoretical), and the reader should derive his/her own conclusions from this montage. For example, in the first chapter the author refers to five paradigms of “speech gesture”: 1) the rhetorical, connected to manual eloquence and the poetics of propaganda; 2) the performative, understood as a symbiosis of word and gesture; 3) the linguistic, based on Iakov Lintsbakh's theory of language and his notation system, Eduard Siever's sound curves, Marr's idea about the origin of language deriving from manual gestures; 4) the poetological, Andrei Bely's thoughts about the dance of the tongue and his analysis of Nikolai Gogol΄'s gestural codes as well as Boris Eikenbaum's articulatory theory of skaz; and finally 5) the speech paradigm with reference to Flusser, who searched for a non-discursive language born out of gesture. Strätling relies on the expressiveness of the material without trying to find connections, distant affinities or similar impulses bridging these concepts. Thus, in the chapter “Pointing,” she juxtaposes different ideas about theatrical gestures, such as Nikolai Evreinov's cathartic experience, Konstantin Stanislavskii's disciplined play, Meyerhold's biomechanics, and the praxis of the Proletkult theater. But, in connecting Stanislavskii's ideas that emerged in 1938 to Meyerhold's concepts of the early 1920s and Alexandre Tairov's prerevolutionary practice, the author ignores the specific and extremely different historical and cultural contexts in which these ideas and practices are embedded.
From Chapter 5 on, Strätling analyzes the poetics of Tretiakov, Osip Mandel΄shtam, and the Oberiu (Kharms’ plays and Druskin's diaries) and demonstrates impressively her new philological method. In the gesture of “Giving” (proceeding from Mauss's analysis of this social ritual and Derrida's deconstructive word play) Strätling explores lexical, semantic, and associative mythological references and the relation between chance and providence in Mandel΄shtam's poem “Vozmi na radost΄ iz moiikh ladonei.” She interprets the poet's gesture as an offering, but his palm full of literary life refers at the same time to death, which allows Strätling to relate Nikolai Fedorov's ideas about resurrection of the dead with Shklovskii's resurrection of the word. She looks at Aleksei Tolstoi's fascination with torture protocols of the seventeenth century, by means of which he hoped to reanimate verbal clichés. She traces the conjunction of hand and deed in Tretiakov's poetics (analyzing his documentary reports, ocherki, and the play I Want a Baby!) with legal discourses and interprets his demand to act as acta, file, denunciation, and interrogation. The last chapter treats not only euphoric rehabilitation of haptic senses through futurists and constructivists but also the hiatus between the semiotic and somatic, the absurdist potentiality of touching, the existential experience of loss (by Kharms), and self-rejection (by Druskin), who discovered the uncanny otherness of his own hand.
Some of the book's less convincing conclusions are caused by the hiatus or lack of coordination between the historical exploration of various concepts and philological analysis (and partially explained by shortening of the original German from 531 pages to 325). The emphasis on Ippolit Sokolov's manifests that had never been realized in practice for demonstrating the ideas of constructivist theater is not persuasive, and the difference between biomechanics and Sergei Eisenstein's bimecanichs remains obscure.
The translation is excellent but nearly all notes referred to German sources, even of the seminal texts available in English, such as Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction or Engel's Dialects of Nature, to name just a few. I have the impression of reading a German book, probably due to its being embedded in German theoretical discourse. But the rich material, the compulsion to rethink the methodological approach, as well as the fine analysis, makes the reading rewarding.
